Lewis Lapham Got It 4 Cheap

The current issue is about medicine, and includes selections from Hippocrates, Plato, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all noteworthy for being – among other things – dead and therefore cheap. It is fronted by a long essay by Mr. Lapham that begins with a quotation from Montaigne and near the end quotes Socrates.

The key to economically plausible publishing: writers who are very old and already famous. Or, alternatively, writers who are very young, poor and not famous at all. What do interns have in common with Plato? They’re cheap.